I often say, when delivering computer training, that it’s not worth trying to learn all the keyboard shortcuts that you come across as there are just too many of them. However, I recommend noting new ones from time to time and seeing if they’re worth committing to memory. Here’s one such – the F11 key “toggles” the full-screen mode when using a browser in Windows (except when using Safari – which is a Mac program).

Normally, when you are looking at a web page, a fair proportion of the screen is taken up with toolbars, status bar, taskbars and the like. You may be doing far more scrolling up and down to see the content of the web page itself than you would like. Hitting the F11 key maximises the size of the window and hides all the un-necessary stuff – leaving you to concentrate on the web page itself. Hitting the F11 key again puts the window back to the way it had previously looked.

A “toggle” switch is a bit of computer jargon that you may come across from time to time. It means a switch that is operated in the same way irrespective of its current setting. Imagine a light switch in the form of a cord. If the light is off and the cord is pulled then the light goes on. If the light is on and the cord is pulled then the light goes off. This, therefore, is a toggle switch. You pull the cord and the light changes its current state. So, in the case of the F11 button, repeatedly hitting it while viewing a web page turns the full-screen view on and off.

Internet Explorer 9 Favorites

Two clients asked me for computer support this week after their favorites disappeared following an upgrade to Internet Explorer 9. If you can’t find yours, don’t panic – they’re there. It’s just that Microsoft is following the trend of making their browser look less cluttered. Look for the cluster of three icons at the top righthand corner of the screen. It looks like this:

The middle icon of these three is for Favorites. If you click on the star it will open a window with your Favorites displayed. This is a toggle switch so clicking on the star again will hide them again.

If you are also missing your Favorites Bar (that used to display your favorite links across the top of the screen), then you can set this to display – as well as other items – by clicking on the relevant option that pops up if you right-click on the star icon. Just to emphasise that – you RIGHT-click on the star to display the toolbar options menu. The menu that pops up is like this:

Select or de-select the various bars by clicking on them (yet more toggles). Items that are currently being displayed have a tick next to them.

In fact, the way that the Favorites works in IE9 is very similar indeed to the way that it works in Firefox 6, except that Firefox calls them Bookmarks (which does have the merit of not upsetting pedantic Brits like me who were taught how to spell properly).